We seed viral content to the Web, to social sites, social news and bookmarking sites, video sites, popular blogs, to power bloggers and power users and to viewers who are most likely to be interested in the specific content/creatives’ targeted niche. We kick-start viral campaigns, or manage entire campaigns, via social advertising and social video advertising using a PPV model. Social video advertising is among the fastest growing segments in advertising today. In 2010, social video advertising views increased 230%, over nine times more than search and display impression growth. Aggregate views for Super Bowl ad campaigns in social video have also increased significantly, surpassing 300 million views in 2011, over 100% more than 2010 results. (Stats Source: Visible Measures)
Natural Seeding v. Paid Seeding
Natural Seeding is earned views within a wide range of the Web’s social, blog and news channels. With Natural Seeding, we cannot guarantee results (numbers or depth of engagement). However, Natural Seeding can be very effective at creating awareness of your product and is a fraction of the price of Paid Seeding. Paid Seeding is essentially a media buy for branded content that essentially pushes views to the same source channels as Natural Seeding. It’s not as critical to have an exceptionally viral creative in order for the content to go viral with Paid Seeding but it does help keep the costs down. And, we can guarantee results up-front: the number of hits and depth of engagement. Paid Seeding can be force-scaled to go viral while working in conjunction with other marketing and advertising activities. That’s an absolute must for many campaigns. And, Paid Seeding is the better way to go when compared to Social Media Advertising since when the SMA budget ends content serving Ads will stop. With Paid Seeding, content stays online and can continue growing; and, can even go super-viral after the campaign ends.
Either with Natural Seeding or Paid Seeding, we only work with content that has strong viral potential. It doesn’t have to be exceptional but it does at least have to be strong. There’s no point in even trying to seed content that virtually no one is going to want to watch. It must be very high-quality, plus funny, controversial or clever (hopefully all three) and, of course, highly- desirable to share. Sound easy enough? Not really, otherwise we’d all be drowning in this stuff. Viral content becomes viral through the process of Internet sharing, typically through The Social Web including Social Sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.), Social News Sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.) and email.
Viral success doesn’t just happen. For example, in the case of videos, the most exceptional commercial videos can go viral completely organically. But we still need to seed even the exceptional ones to simulate the natural viral process in order to kick-start viral campaigns at an advanced level. If videos don’t get recognition early-on and hit the video charts early-on, they have very little chance of going super-viral (200k to 1M+ views in a short time-frame). The combination of exceptional content plus 4thWeb’s smart viral marketing and seeding will lead to deeper engagement with your targeted audience, and ultimately a successful viral campaign.
Highlights of 4thWeb’s Viral Seeding services. This is not the entire list and we’re flexible to perform all of, more of, or a subset of these services for our clients.
- Plan, build, execute and manage a viable viral seeding campaign for your targeted market and demographic.
- Research your audience, and pre-test and evaluate creatives in targeted markets, worldwide.
- In the case of videos, Hire top directors and/or production companies or refer them to you; or we can produce viral videos in-house with local talent and crews.
- In the case of articles, blogs or other non-video content, Collaborate with you or other agencies to produce viral content in-house.
- Seed the campaign in all the right places based on our research and discovery of your specific influencers and influential communities.
- Throughout the campaign, reach out to influence the influencers in order to engage them with the wider targeted and influential communities vis-a-vis positive social commenting and social sharing.
Contact 4thWeb today to find out how we can help you with Viral Seeding.
